In his contribution to the volume Russian Literature since 1991 entitled “The Postmodernist Novel”, Mark Lipovetsky makes the now rather widespread claim that the Russian postmodernist post-Soviet novel represents a break with the totalizing tendencies of the socialist realist novel and opens for new ways of experiencing and conceptualizing the world. In this paper this claim is critically examined on the basis of a reading of Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustota (transl. as Buddha’s Little Finger or Clay Machine Gun against the backdrop of contemporary debates about realism and simulacra. Here it is argued that the Soviet myth of Chapaev lends itself to the totality of the private myth.

A Day of the World (Den’ mira) was a documentary volume, published in 1937, that was intended to provide a snapshot of the entire globe on a single day, September 27, 1935. The tensions within and around A Day of the World capture some of the basic contradictions in socialist realism, the official aesthetic method of Soviet art: between publicity and intimacy and between the dream of synchronous, global revolution and the aberrant temporalities of individual experience.

In the present article, the main principles of the reforms in Revolutionary Russia in the sphere of art are analyzed through the example of the reorganization of the Higher Artistic School of the Imperial Academy of Arts of St. Petersburg into the Free Art Studios (Svomas). The studios were to become a tool for the transformation of the surrounding reality and for the development of the artistic consciousness of the people. The intended result of those transformations was the complete spiritual and material harmonization of society, while the perfection of artistic interpretation was to be replaced with the perfection of social living. The research presented here is based on the archival materials and is one of the very first publications on the problems associated with the reform of artistic education in the first post-revolutionary years.

The purpose of this paper is to focus attention on the Stūra Māja [Corner House] of Riga and how the building was used. I have also conducted interviews, with both the former Latvian KGB Chief Edmunds Johanson, as well as the former Latvian dissident Leo Hiršsons.

In the much visited and favorably reviewed exhibition “Revolution. Russian Art 1917—1932” held at the Royal Academy of Arts in February through April 2017, a large number of works was displayed, borrowed from art museums all over Russia and other countries, as well as from private collections.

The post-communist countries did not see the Holocaust narrative and its relation to the history of the EU as part of their own narrative. Since entering the EU, a number of Eastern European countries have challenged the EU’s master narrative and tried to gain acceptance for — and draw attention to — their memory of Soviet Communism.

In her book on the East German experiment, The People’s State, Fulbrook launched a concept that owes a lot to her life-long preoccupation with Max Weber’s theories of Herrschaft. She calls it “participatory dictatorship”. An unbelievably large proportion of the population — roughly one in six, she calculated — took an active part in activities that had to be carried out to uphold the political system as such.

The postcommunist concept of transition, as it was in use during the 1990s and early 2000s, is analyzed from the viewpoint of its intellectual prehistory. The concept is partly contrasted with alternative notions, partly relocated to its antithesis of communist ideology, where “transition” actually was an established concept. The reconstruction of the dialectics between communist and postcommunist transitology indicates and responds to a need for historical reflexivity, argues the author here.

The belief in technology was fundamental in Soviet culture. When the nuclear reactor exploded and harvested souls and spread illness throughout a vast area, over the course of many years, an image of the collapse of the Soviet Union was thereby created. Chernobyl became an image of the apocalypse of communism.